


Dreams of Silver

by isasolan



Series: Arafinwë [5]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon Het Relationship, F/M, Gen, Married Couple, Married Sex, Parents & Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-12
Updated: 2013-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-08 07:45:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/758858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isasolan/pseuds/isasolan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finarfin has a troubling dream after all their children are grown, a dream that causes a rift that will haunt him well into the Third Age.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreams of Silver

**Author's Note:**

> Arafinwë=Finarfin  
> Artanis/Nerwen=Galadriel
> 
> I take "For with regard to generation, the power and the will are not among the Eldar distinguishable" (HoME X, Laws and Customs) to mean that the Eldar are free to choose whether coitus results in a child or not.
> 
> Finarfin and Eärwen had four children, not five, as per the Shibboleth (HoME XII): Finrod, Angrod, Aegnor and Galadriel.

He is not used to sailing and the sea-breeze leaves him drowsy. He ignores his brothers-in-law’s gentle teasing and gives in to sleep.

 

_Arafinwë is standing on the shore. He does not know this beach. Strange... Someone else is with him... He turns towards the presence... A silver-haired girl. Not Eärwen. He does not know her face... but he can feel a deep kinship. “My child?” he wonders. She smiles at him. She has Eärwen’s eyes. “He returns today, I cannot wait,” she tells him, and looks at the sea again. She is waiting for her husband, Arafinwë understands. He feels happy for her. A mariner? A Teler, probably... What is your name, he wants to ask. What is your husband’s name... But the dream starts fading and his heart shrinks. No, he shouts. No._

 

He awakens with a gasp. Dreams are unusual enough, and prophetic ones even rarer. A daughter, he dreamt of a daughter. A daughter not yet born, with Eärwen’s hair and Eärwen’s eyes. But how can it be? Artanis is nearing her fiftieth begetting day. Their children were are all born with less than twenty years between the births, and this would be the longest gap. He had simply assumed those were all the children they would beget, and the urge to conceive had lessened and dulled until he was perfectly content.

 

But he had seen this girl with such painful clarity that he finds a deep longing in his heart. He needs this child like he had needed all the others. The same irrepressible urge to join himself with his wife and create a life, nurture her with his very fëa until the birth and hold her in his arms when she gives her first cry. Silver haired, like Eärwen. How he had wished to beget many silver-haired children, but instead they had all inherited his colouring. The smallest of disappointments, swiftly forgotten with the overwhelming love he feels for his golden children.

 

He wants this silver daughter. He will find no peace until they beget her.

  
  


*

  
  


He should have brought it up _before_ he lays with his wife, maybe, but his beautiful Eärwen has the infuriating habit of wearing short dresses that reveal her legs, and low-plunging necklines that barely hide her breasts. Telerin fashion. The Blessed Realm is blessed indeed.

 

He runs his tongue over her darker skin, marvelling at her taste as if they were still newlyweds. But he no longer is the fumbling youth of their wedding day and knows what to touch, how to stroke, how to please and tease until she trembles under him. She whispers the pet name she has given him in her language. They always speak Telerin when they make love, because it is easier for her but also because he prefers it. Telerin is Alqualondë and sex and uncomplicated joy. Unlike Tirion, where Arafinwë is always unhappy.

 

He slides inside of her with blinding delight and revels in the familiar tightness of her body, still bewitching even after four children. It is not until they fall into the rhythm they both love best that Arafinwë remembers the silver-haired child. He is overwhelmed by a desire to conceive just as powerful as the need to thrust faster and spill his seed into his wife. Their minds and fëar are joined, and she reads his thoughts as easily as if they were her own.

 

“A child?” she asks out loud and presses a hand to his chest to stop him. She sounds baffled. Arafinwë stills, and feels the tip of his ears warming up as he opens his eyes to look at her sheepishly.

 

“I would like another child, yes,” he says. He squirms uncomfortably, stiff and ready inside of her. “I saw another child in a dream. A daughter.”

 

“But I can bear no more, my love,” she says and strokes his cheek with some sadness. “I have borne you four children... four _sons_ ,” she jokes, and he would laugh if he were not so pained. Nerwen is more a son than a daughter. “I do not have the strength for a fifth.”

 

“Please,” he begs, though he knows these things cannot be forced. “I saw her.”

 

“It was but a dream. Not all dreams are prophecy, my golden-swan.”

 

He lays on top of her, trying to control the disappointment raging violently within him. It feels as if this child is taken from him, denied existence... thrown into the Void. He would weep, were he still not inside of Eärwen. She holds his hips and moves him gently, making him shudder with a jolt of pleasure. He finishes half-heartedly and rolls away from her in dismay.

 

It will be weeks until he can look into her eyes again without feeling defeat.

  
  


*

  
  


Losing his four children at once is a blow he will never recover from.

 

As he walks back on the sand, feverish with grief and mad with regret, he thinks of the silver-daughter for the first time in years. Not that he had forgotten her. He never had. He had merely silenced the pain, buried it deep in the corners of his fëa where Eärwen could not reach. But when he sobs on the shores of Alqualondë this loss hits him with unexpected violence. In his anguish he fantasises that the silver-child would not have hardened her heart. She would have turned with him. She would not have damned herself to tears unnumbered like her golden-haired siblings. It would break him even further, were he not empty.

 

He has no father, no children, no brothers, and once he enters Alqualondë it dawns on him that he no longer has brothers-in-law, and who knows, perhaps even no wife.

  
  
  


*

 

“I regret it, you know,” Eärwen tells him when he is about to go to war. Clad in a white armour that sickens him to no end. Long ago, he had vowed to never touch a sword again. But the Valar command it. Arafinwë is a King, and he obeys.

 

“What do you regret?”

 

Their years together have been strained since he was appointed King. Eärwen did not speak to him for eleven years. She blamed him for his brothers’ crimes. She blamed him for failing to stop their children’s fall into ruin. And she was right to blame him. He thought of dying often, of laying down in the enormous bed that had once been his father’s, and letting himself fall into grief. But the advisors roused him periodically. There was so much to be done in Tirion, the city he always hated. So much to rebuild in Aman. So much forgiveness to earn. He spent months in Alqualondë mending his brothers’ destruction. And mending his marriage, if begging and shouting at a closed door counted as so. It had worked, eventually, though their union was never the same since.

 

“Not bearing you a fifth child when you asked,” she answers softly. There are tears shining in her eyes when she adjusts his golden cloak on his shoulders. They have not spoken Telerin in years. It feels almost wrong to hear her using it now.

 

The pain of being reminded of the silver-child startles him, but he shakes his head gently. “It matters not, my swan,” he says. He might die in this war, like all their children probably have. This old quarrel means very little.

 

“Do not die,” she whispers, reading his thoughts. “I would not want to live knowing our last years together were wasted in resentment.”

 

But they were, he thinks. They were.

  
  


*

  
  


He is summoned to the docks some time in the Third Age of the Sun. It is unusual, but he makes haste nonetheless.

 

No one is there to meet him, but a ship from Endórë is docking just as he dismounts. Some Maiar are standing on the pier. Irmo’s Maiar. It must be an ill passenger. Arafinwë’s heart shrinks at the thought it might be Artanis, the last of his children alive. The pain of their last meeting had never quite dulled. She was proud and fierce, and would not listen, and would not forgive. But at least she lived.

 

But then he sees _her_.

 

One of the Maiar helps her step down the boat, and the wind pushes her hood back. Her face is ashen, stricken with unspeakable grief and horror, but her silver hair spills upon her shoulders with blinding radiance.

 

“Silver-child,” Arafinwë gasps and moves close to her, his arms extended to support her if she falters. She stares at him, puzzled, and he discovers she has Eärwen’s eyes.

 

“Nearly,” she says, her voice weak and broken. “My name is Celebrían.”

 

Arafinwë pulls her in his arms, delicately, shuddering at the extent of her pain when he feels the bruises and deep cuts on her frail body.

 

“Grandfather?” she asks sheepishly, perceiving the kinship of their fëar through the embrace. He realises he is weeping when he sees his own tears mingled with hers on her cloak.

 

“My child,” he murmurs, and kisses her silver tears.

  
  



End file.
